Funniest thing I’ve read in a week!
Dude, TBH, I wouldn’t be surprised if going to a massage therapist would be an epic experience. I would wonder if it would help you get in touch with some healing.
Right on, man!
Also how about taking 2 weeks rest rather than dropping your custom?
What are your thoughts about Harmonic Singularity?
I’ve considered massage therapists before. I’d have to do some more research, if it’s consistent sessions I don’t think I can afford it at the moment.
2 weeks? Feels like I just started this cycle lol. Would that be ok? I honestly don’t even know with ZP anymore. I’ll certainly try it.
It’s definitely caught my eye, unfortunately I don’t have money to spend on customs now so it’ll have to be a future thing.
The older I get the more things are revealed to me about my family history that just caused a domino effect of generational trauma.
When I was growing up I thought I was weaker than everyone around me. Turns out I was just dealing with things I had no control over.
I’m moving away from feeling like I did something wrong in my life. Things happened, I was conditioned by them. The only thing left to do now is to undo that to live my best life. It does suck, but the alternative is living the same crappy life filled with the same behavior.
Internal Adjustment
The growth is real.
AND
‘to live your best life to undo that’
Anyway. I hear you. This personal growth business is some humbling stuff.
Maybe just do 1 or 2 first. If it’s wonderful enough, it may even provide you some impetus to make more money.
A lot of these things (i.e., therapy things) work best if you go in first without feeling like you’re locked into a multi-year commitment. Knowing that you can leave actually can help you to relax more into the process. And it also allows you to ‘shop around’ until you find someone who has a good rapport and connection with you.
Put down that mountain, Atlas!
‘Okay, it’s supposed to be the sky and the full weight of the heavens. But ‘Put down that sky’ definitely does not have the same ring to it.’
That’s a really going point, I’ll keep that perspective in mind and start branching off in that direction.
Haha, I’m getting there. What’s interesting is these things I’ve carried, well some of them I didn’t even know I did or that I didn’t have to carry them. So in a way I did get condemned like Atlas to carry the weight of these things, but at the same time I wasn’t even aware of who was doing the condemning.
Watched Everything Everywhere All at Once yesterday. No exaggerating, this is my new favorite movie since the Matrix. It was beautifully done.
I won’t give anything away, but this is one of those movies that sort of interrupted a repetitive narrative running through my head about life. It just felt expansive and open and exploratory. It was entertaining but at the same time it felt like it was exploring themes that a lot of people are questioning more of today.
More discipline is not what I need. What I need is understanding and patience with myself. Trying to embed this one into my daily life. Much of my life has been a battle, but some of that battling has been too focused on fighting parts of me I deemed undesirable or fundamentally flawed.
You’re killing it.
Finally got all my music gear organized and setup ready to go. It’s not ideal but I’ll have to brainstorm some ideas for better working area.
Started laying down an idea last night, but it was late so I had to pack it in early. What I noticed was a more intuitive understanding of the relationship between harmony and melody. The chord progression can either push the melody or the harmony can take a step back and let the melody take center stage. Really interesting stuff. It’s like micro composition.
I want to be kind to people, don’t want to walk around with this aggressive demeanor. But people lately are just really trying my patience. And my patience is zero tolerance at this point. I’ve had enough of it.
How the hell do you generally be nice without people deciding to use that as an opportunity to exploit you? I’ve gotten better at putting boundaries in place, but honestly the whole thing works better if I project an air of “don’t even think about it” so you dont have to mingle with that crap in the first place.
I think maybe this is just a shift here. I don’t really like it you know? All my life I’ve been a very open and trusting person and it’s hurt me more than helped. I have this internal moral obligation to try to rise above it all and not succumb to the more aggressive nature. But people make that so damn hard.
Remember that there was a time in your life when you could barely write; not to mention, writing your name while also carrying on a conversation with someone else.
When first learning or deepening a skill, it tends to require a greater proportion of our focus, attention, and effort. As the skill develops and becomes internalized, we are able to use it with more subtlety, nuance, and naturalness. Most importantly, it dominates less of our attention and requires less recovery time.
With continued practice, the ‘don’t even think about it’ will become just a tool that you’re able to turn on and turn off when and where it’s appropriate.
The counterpart to this is to keep doing what you’ve already been doing quite successfully: working through and releasing your own internalized trauma so that you can perceive and respond flexibly; rather than staying stuck in ‘War of Attrition’ mode.
I’m working on this too.
Thanks man. That’s definitely something I need to acknowledge more. This is absolutely a skill I’m still developing. Some people have the advantage of learning it early in life so it’s more of a subconscious process. But even with the subliminals my mind has to calibrate itself to the introduction of an entirely foreign sense of how I project myself.
So they, who learned it early in life, have the advantage of unselfconscious competence; whereas we, who are developing it later, receive the advantage of balanced self-awareness and wise temperance (with a side-order of awkwardness 
).
Just so.
Well said.
It’s an ‘adventure’, to say the least.
Sometimes I can’t stop throwing myself into the mud and being awful to myself. It’s times like this I’ve learned expending effort to “stop thinking negatively” is a waste of time. A broad awareness of what those negative thoughts are helps a lot more. Realizing how they hurt me, they aren’t me, and with time they will lose impact.
I had two social events this past weekend. One was my cousin’s wedding and the other was a BBQ at my friend’s place. In both events I struggle with drifting in and out of conversations and engagement. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like sometimes I’m in a group able to contribute and sometimes I’m just in a group and detached. Sometimes I can get back into the vibe of the parties and sometimes I’m just stuck in this place of not feeling connected, but not wanting to leave either.
A lot of this triggered emotional wounds of the past. Feeling like an outcast, loser, nobody liking me, just being nice but not really liking me, stuff like that. Sometimes it feels like I missed a learning experience or integral part of growing up that helps you bond, maintain, or build relationships with those around you. It doesn’t feel natural, it feels like I have to try really hard to push past my own emotional wounds to open up to people close to me.
So I’ve just been processing a lot these past few days. I just feel really messed up when it comes to relationships in general. I don’t feel the bond as much as I feel like I should. Sometimes I worry I’m just a sociopath or a narcissist and then I think everyone would be better off not knowing me because I’ll just end up hurting someone one day unintentionally.
Low Empathy + High Insecurity + Perceiving Social Interactions as Win/Lose Contests = Narcissistic Behavior
Remove any one of those parts and it probably won’t happen.
To balance that incredibly negative sounding post. I was talking with a friend of mine and he wanted to create a text based choose your own adventure style video game with a group of my friends. He was looking for me to do the music. So this would be a future sci Fi aesthetic soundtrack, think blade runner/rave/industrial style music. I’ve always really liked music that sounds futuristic or like it belongs in another dimension or world. We’re getting a discord group together to get things going.
Having a long term project with creative goals will be good for focusing the direction of the music. I don’t have a lot of experience scoring or creating for media and it can be intimidating. But man nothing actually motivates me like creative pursuits. It just presents a very strong contrast between what I might have a natural gift for vs the things I’ve forced myself into in order to just survive.
I’m pretty tired of feeling like I have to force myself into my current job. The more I think about it the more I feel like I’m just doing it because I have to not because I want to. Even learning about this network and security thing, I’ve just got zero motivation to engage with it. I keep telling everyone around me that’s the long term goal and everything is on course but it’s really not.
So the question “how’s life going? How’s the job, what are you looking to move into?” Is less “it’s good, I’m going to be learning more soon and building up my skills to take on another role” and more “I have no idea what I’m doing, I don’t really like this, I just keep telling people I do because anything else makes it impossible to bond or appear normal”.
It feels nice to lie to myself and say I have a plan. But I don’t. And I keep screwing up my trajectory by thinking I can gaslight myself into believing it if I just think correctly or have some change. I’m tired of lying to myself and other people. I’m not going to do it anymore. The world is nuts right now, everything seems unpredictable, the cost of living has skyrocketed. There’s an expectation for me to just carry on with my life carrying out my same mind numbing hourly routine at my job executing it like a robot as if none of this stressful shit has been happening for the past two years. I’m over it.
My comfort zone is more than comfort. It’s safety, it’s survival. Going against it is pretty much death in my mind. I’m not talking comfort like binging Netflix or eating fast food. I’m talking drastically different lifestyle changes, going against everyone around you who says something is a bad idea, dropping the only professional job I’ve ever had with the only skills I’ve ever built, starting from scratch. You can spend your whole life designing a routine that just centers around keeping you safe or secure but it kills you inside. I want freedom from that. I don’t want fears guiding my decisions anymore and pushing me into stuff doesn’t help add value to my life.
That reminds me I had a dream last night. I was escaping from a location where I was held captive and forced to do the bidding of some higher up or I’d be killed for insubordination. So I timed an escape. I saw freedom in the horizon and I didn’t know what was out there but if I went in that one direction I thought I’d reach something. The path out of there was waist deep snow and as I ran off nobody followed me because they knew I’d just die from the harsh weather and lack of resources. I woke up at the part where I was beginning the path towards the escape.
Back on the subs today. Going to experiment with my custom first, then Regeneration when playing my stack. My reasoning here is maybe running the custom first will give Regeneration more noticeable stuff to work with.
3 minutes, then 3 days of rest. Sticking to it this time around. Also I have to say my two weeks of rest kind of sucked. It seems like for me I can have too much rest or non-exposure and I start slipping back into bad habits and mindsets.
But I guess it was needed after the bunch of exposure i put myself through. So now we’re starting fresh. Fingers crossed this works out.
Now I’m wondering how these subs work. If the reason I can’t jump right to being confident is less about limitations of the mind and more about not having a solid reference.
Same thing goes for music. Not exactly killing it in the completed projects department.
We all know experience tends to be the best teacher, but what can be done to cultivate it internally more? Visualization maybe. God I suck at visualization so much. Starting to think I might have aphantasia.
Funny how every time I run Regeneration my thoughts start moving to seeing a therapist. It does seem to be a piece of this puzzle I need to engage with. I never followed through with the other one, the move took up too much time and the psychiatrist she gave me was outside my state so it was a dead end.
Now I have to get back on the search and figure out what I can afford in terms of therapy. Good old US and its antiquated mental health system, the individuals that need it most rarely get it due to financial barriers. The irony here is you need to budget for something like this, but an aspect of ADHD is money management issues so more hurdles to figure out.
Just not feeling good lately. Everything was tightly compartmentalized in order to function, but now it’s unraveling so it’s causing every day difficulties. I knew this was coming, healing is always messy. The problem comes with trying to maintain professionalism in my work environment when I’ve stopped caring because their needs aren’t as important as mine. Rarely employers work with you or accommodate you in any substantial fashion when dealing with mental health. They see it as more of a liability.